Anak Krakatau volcanic activity between 24.-26.Oct.2018. All explosions filmed in real time, even at night ! Note abundant volcanic lightning visible at night. Also lavabombs hitting into the sea and causing fires inside the forest. Daylight explosions with view into the crater from drone.
Arctic Sea Ice Volume 13-Dec-2018
Sea Ice Extent (Global Antarctic and Arctic) – Day 347 – 2018
Bioenergy Climate Bomb
Trees are not the solution to high CO2 despite what “scientists” say.
I’m not worried about CO2, but I am worried about the governments and people who lie and say burning trees is low-CO2. Some people get it.
KATOWICE, Poland – Today, it’s being called the bomb that could explode the United Nations carbon climate emissions accounting system – and possibly destabilize the global climate.
When first conceived, this bomb was thought to be a boon: turn trees and woody biomass into wood pellets. Burn that woody biomass at power plants instead of coal to generate electricity. Plant more trees where the wood was harvested to offset the emissions produced by burning pellets. Then call it green and celebrate a sustainable way to reduce coal emissions.
Some 20 years ago, bioenergy produced from biomass was seen as the next new thing, and a valuable sustainable resource. And because it was deemed renewable, countries that burned biomass – wood pellets instead of coal – would not be required to count those carbon emissions. All that carbon dioxide was believed to be absorbed by the new tree seedlings.
For the purpose of United Nations carbon accounting policy, established under the Kyoto Protocol, the burning of biomass was established as, and is still considered, carbon neutral.
But in recent years, the supposed benign process has been revealed through a series of scientific studies and reports to be a dangerous fraud. It is the ticking bomb underlying the UN accounting system; a potentially large-scale hidden, unreported source of carbon emissions that helps developed countries to meet their Paris pledges.
Read the rest
Arctic Sea Ice Volume 12-Dec-2018
Sea Ice Extent (Global Antarctic and Arctic) – Day 346 – 2018
Russian Cosmonauts Use KNIVES and SHEARS to Slice At Space Station
Looking for clues about the leak
Astronauts were forced to use knives and shears to carve a gaping hole into the side of the International Space Station to find clues to a mysterious drilled hole that leaked valuable cabin pressure four months ago.
Two Russian cosmonauts – Sergei Prokopyev and Oleg Kononenko – were forced to use an armoury of tools to uncover the source of the leak in a gruelling seven hour, 45 minute spacewalk.
Dramatic images and footage show insulation and debris from the spacecraft’s hull floating into space as they hacked into the side of the Soyuz capsule with daggers and garden shear-like devices.
Roscosmos, Russia’s space agency, said the aim was to discover whether the ‘small but dangerous’ hole was deliberately caused in an act of ‘sabotage’ or if it had been made in space.
The two-millimetre cavity on the Soyuz spaceship docked at the ISS caused an air leak detected in August, two months after the craft’s last voyage.
Until Tuesday, astronauts had only been able to examine the hole from inside the spacecraft.
Russians Sergei Prokopyev and Oleg Kononenko spotted the tiny hole in the external hull of the Soyuz capsule, more than five hours into their gruelling spacewalk.
What made it especially hard is that the Soyuz spacecraft, unlike the ISS, was not designed to be repaired in spacewalks and has no outside railings for astronauts to hold onto.
‘There’s nothing, that’s the problem,’ Mr Kononenko said ahead of the outing.
It’s snowing more in Antarctica
Antarctica has seen a “significant” change in ice mass following increased snowfall during the 20th century
The factual part of the story:
“Our new results show a significant change in the surface mass balance [from snowfall] during the 20th century.
“The largest contribution is from the Antarctic Peninsula, where the annual average snowfall during the first decade of the 21st century is 10% higher than at the same period in the 19th century.
“From the ice cores we know that the current rate of change in snowfall is unusual in the context of the past 200 years.”
Renewable Energy in Europe = Wood = Killing Trees
As of 2016 you can see from this graph that renewable energy for a lot of Europe really just means wood.
The red bar is woods percentage of renewables.
The green bar is wood share of total energy.
For example, Estonia gets 90% of its renewable energy from wood.
Green energy means killing trees.
Estonia is killing trees.
In April 2018, representatives from the international forest movement gathered in Estonia to discuss the protection of forests and peoples’ rights. While there, they learned about the serious threats to Estonia’s forests.
One significant threat to forests is a planned biorefinery close to Tartu, in the east of the country. The biorefinery would use a quarter of Estonia’s annual wood production (approximately 3.3 million m3 of wood), and the impact on the environment is immense: between 2001 and 2015, 285,000 hectares of the country’s forests were lost, despite warnings from the Estonian Academy of Sciences that the logging was compromising healthy and resilient ecosystems. For example, habitat for several birds and the flying squirrel, a species protected by the EU Habitats Directive, decreased significantly.
While the national government continues to ignore local resistance against the biorefinery project, the international forest movement published a statement supporting the people of Tartu in their fight to have it stopped.
The expansion of the biorefinery and other ongoing projects in Estonia are a perfect example of how the EU’s renewable energy directive (RED) can backfire. The EU allows its Member States to subsidise the production of energy from wood, and Estonia has taken this seriously: between 2009 (introduction of the RED) and 2016, renewable energy production from wood grew by more than 65 per cent, accompanied by an ominous increase in logging. This has also negatively affected Estonian forests’ role in mitigating climate change: between 2005 and 2030, it is projected that the country’s forests will turn from a sink into a source of emissions. Currently, Estonia already harvests 90 per cent of its annual forest growth.
Estonia plans to ‘trade’ a surplus of its renewable energy with other EU countries. But the EU should be warned that this comes at the expense of a considerable forest and climate deficit.
sunshine hours 